Have We Reached “Peak Content”?

Buzzfeed has announced it’s firing 15% of its workforce. Verizon
Media, after a $4.6 Billion write-down, is also laying off staff from its AOL,
Yahoo and HuffPost brands. Mic.com was sold for less than 10c on the dollar to
Bustle in late 2018, and Mashable went to Ziff Davis for a paltry $50 million.
Vox, Refinery29 and Vice have also been written down.

Traditional publishers aren’t safe either – Gannett, the
largest single newspaper publisher in the United States, is also laying off
senior staff, mirroring similar cuts at Fairfax here in Australia.

And now that brands are playing the role of publishers,
creating their own content and sharing it directly across their owned and paid
channels, they’re facing the very same problems.

What does this mean for these brands – the ones that have, for the last few years, been told to embrace the content mindset? If publishing is itself unsustainable, how is a brand supposed to make money out of a content or audience-led model?

The problem facing us all

The realities of online media haven’t been kind to the
publishers or their parent companies… or indeed to brands.

In a word, the problem is scale. And if the problem is
scale, the solution can’t also be scale. Yet this is exactly how so many have
tried to combat the problem.

Publishers like Buzzfeed and HuffPost, along with Facebook
and Google, created (and fed off) an industry and atmosphere where bite-sized
content was king, but the market has since become oversaturated.

As Max Willens of Digiday explains, creating all this content
is a costly venture. “Pursuing scale is not a sensible strategy, particularly
if you’re hunting it by hiring people to write content. If that’s your sole
source of income, it’s very difficult to build a thriving business.”

Short-term solutions have failed

The content machine is insatiable, and making money from it
isn’t easy.

Pushed to find new streams of revenue, publishers have tried
everything. They’ve installed paywalls, sold sponsored content, and scaled up
production of shortform video, throwaway clickbait and now podcasts. Vice
hooked up with HBO to create longform content and BuzzFeed explored a
now-cancelled project with Netflix… and sold Tasty-branded homewares through
Walmart.

Brands are feeling the same bite. Sure, shortform content is great for social
feeds and sharing, but does it build an audience and fortify a legacy brand?
Does it create revenue, or does it drain resources while actively denigrating
the very quality that these brands strive for?

It also probably doesn’t help either that Facebook and
Google have such a stranglehold on audiences. When Facebook tells people that
Instant Articles, shortform video and listicles are the best way to engage
users, they follow instructions. The wheels on the bus go round and round.

But this isn’t actually what the “content” or “brand
newsroom” model is all about. It’s about creating an owned audience from which
positive outcomes can be derived.

If your brand’s model is to monetise its audience by using
its content to minimise other media and advertising expenses, then you’re in a
stronger position than many media companies.

What can brands learn from all of this?

In the end this is all about revenue via audience
monetisation.

The good news for brands is that unlike publishers, they
already have their own monetisation opportunities via their existing products
and services – they only need to use media to rent audiences’ attention. If a
media property stops performing, they can put their spend elsewhere.

That said, there’s still much to be learned from the way
publishers have suffered at the hands of the content beast.

Avoid the race to the lowest common denominator.

The content-driven approach doesn’t mean brands should
mirror the bite-sized mass-publishing that publishers seem to be so keen on.

What do audiences really value? They value stuff that
surprises, delights, informs, educates and entertains. But brands don’t need to
be all things to all people – they can create the exact content experiences
their audiences want or need, to meet a specific requirement at a specific
time.

If your core business isn’t to trade eyeballs for ad
revenue, then don’t follow the same tactics as those for whom it is.

If you do, then scale, fragmentation and consolidation are
only going make your situation worse – and Europe’s proposed “link tax”
probably isn’t going to help either.

Only fight the fights that are worth fighting. Don’t spread
your budget too thin; if you don’t have the money to produce hundreds of
snackable videos a month, then don’t.

See your content for what it is: an owned channel with long-term potential.

No brand was built in a day. So why should your content or
advertising be?

This is a key difference between the situation facing
publishers and that facing brands. Both may feel the need to feed the content
beast and drive immediate outcomes from content activities, but brands have the
luxury of choice.

Publishing content is a brand-building exercise. Take it
slowly, and don’t treat it like a throwaway piece of ad creative.

To sum up, it’s important that brands recognise that being a
content-led brand doesn’t make you a content brand or publisher. Create revenue
by building and leveraging your audience, not by copying those who sell
audiences or impressions.

It’s getting harder to cut through the clutter, but that
doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If you stay on message and nail your
product-audience fit, then you’re all set. If you play your cards right, you
won’t even need to install a paywall.

Craig Gibson is Client Strategy Director at iProspect Brisbane. He leads strategy for a number of our key enterprise clients, specialising in solving both client and consumer problems across all touchpoints, from data and insights to strategy and creative.